The Emperor slowly descended from the throne and the royal procession formed for exit. The band played its loudest. The courtiers and bureaucrats kept up their shouts of “Bravo! Bravo!” Whatever of spontaneity there may have been in the first outburst was now gone, and the words were pronounced in a unison which became rhythmic. Before the Emperor had reached the door even these shouts had subsided. His own aides-de-camp and the generals alone maintained the noise. A paid claque could not have been more marked. At first the Emperor bowed to the Duma. But his bow was chill and formal, his eye cold and severe. To his right he turned with warmth. Generally he recognized a face and smiled, but to the left his expression was statuesque. The ladies in his train did much better. Several of them quite ignored the glittering array on the right, and bowed and smiled most graciously to the Duma members, and with more seeming spontaneity and sincerity. After the imperial cortège, the bureaucracy filed out in a brilliant pageant, and last of all the Duma. The spectacle had surely been in entire keeping with the ostentatious traditions of czardom, but to the most reactionary bureaucrats it was patent that the “simple peasants” had not been impressed as had been expected. They had enjoyed it--as they would have enjoyed a military manœuver. They had watched it as a passing show, and were quite at a loss as to the reason for it, or the connection between it and their business. Many freely expressed their amazement at the gowns of the ladies. There were scores among the Duma members who had never before set eyes on grand ladies, and they could not repress their surprise at their décolleté cut. “Why did the Emperor bring us here?” asked one naïvely, “was it to show us his women?” “I thought the Emperor’s house would be full of holy pictures,” said another sorrowfully, in the first blush of disillusionment. “If the government tells us again that they have no money for famine, we can tell them where they might get a few copecks,” added another with a significant shake of his peasant head. The magnificent ceremony with all its brilliant pageantry, the most gorgeous spectacle of a traditionally spectacular court, completely failed to inspire the confidence of the working-men and peasants in their olden rulers. On the contrary, it inspired amazement, discontent, and distrust. The Czar, who is probably the greatest living genius for missing opportunities, read his empty speech--read it well, eloquently--and for the first time in his life saw face to face real men who were not fawning sycophants, and who dared express their true feelings when these were not of admiration or of approbation. To facilitate the transportation of the Duma members from the Winter Palace to the Tauride Palace, where the sessions were to be held, they were loaded into boats and conveyed most of the way by water.